I work at a shop that has sales both weekly and monthly. To advertise these sales, somebody in the company spends a shift making small and large signs in MS word from a standardized template. This is really time consuming, and is prone to mistakes.
I want to design a program to pull the necessary product information from our database and put it into these signs.
I want to use wordart or a wordart substitute to create many of the objects, as this will ensure a standard size (to fit on the signs) and style. I don't care so much for the effects, I am just concerned with the height and width of the words as a whole.
I have created a small program that does this using the Interop library, and while it creates a near perfect replica of the original sign, I fear it might be too slow to pull off doing 30-50 signs in one sitting.
Is there an alternative to MS wordart that would allow me to create either an image or other text object that can be scaled to fit within a certain size?
If you are trying to replace (or relieve) an employee from making signs by writing code, and your code is near perfect but just a bit slow, then you should profile your code to see why it is slow. I can't image that your code is slower than the employee :D. So you shouldn't discard Word interop just because of the speed, if it does just exactly what you want it to do.
Also, since Word-art is a Word-thing, doing that without Word is a huge amount of work. If you have the correct fonts, you might be able to do this from .NET using GDI+ (the standard image drawing interface). However, this will require some tutorial reading and trial-and-error. There is a praised GDI+ FAQ with lots of information on the subject.
A possible cause for slow interop is the creation (and destruction) of Word instances.